saber964 wrote:[uote="Lord Skimper"]One would think the non mandating crew would be evacuated on half or more of the life pods and all sub craft before the BC and CA CL went into battle. Pursers, chef's, marines, Night shift, etc...

This so stupid Skimper even for you. (And that's saying something) There are NO and I do mean NO excessive personnel aboard a ship of war. Everyone is needed and used. Even cooks are used to prepare food to be taken or picked up by GQ stations or people are rotated so others can sleep or relax. I have been personally at General Quarters for 19 straight hours during Desert Storm. FYI U.S. Navy veteran.

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Dittos

On current USN vessels, supply clerks, Disbursing clerks and Admin types (PN/YN's) report to assigned Damage Control stations.All personnel onboard have (1) a "normal" work assignment location, and (2) a GQ (Battle Stations/General Quarters) assignment. The engineering and weapons spaces are normally "double-watched" at GQ and other engineering watchstanders can be rotated in from the Damage Control parties depending on qualifications.

As noted by other Vets, there are no excess personnel onboard ship (with possible exception of Airdales)

-- Stewart(20 yrs USN)(My shoes were black/My shirt was blue/My parents were married to each other/ I worked for a living[/quote]

My Damage Control locker (Repair 3) contained about 30-35 personnel. It had people from all over the ship. IIRC 8-10 from Engineering 10 from Deck Division 10 from Supply 5 from Combat System.

(3) While history, real life politics, my own political and philosophical views, my study of history, and my own experiences in dealing with government entities, political parties, and life in general over the last 60 or so years shape my writing and the stories I choose to tell, they are stories. I attempt, sometimes with a greater degree of success than at other times, to be respectful of almost any political philosophy so long as the people who hold it are sincere. There are some political, social, and religious ideologies and systems which I find just plain evil, and I don't shy away from portraying them as such, yet once upon a time people were able to remember that someone who disagreed with them might simply be wrong and not a malevolent demon come from the nether depths of Hell to wreak havoc on all that is self-evidently (of course) Just, Pure, Approved by God, and Nonfattening. But however that may be, and while I may sometimes fail to treat all sides of every argument or political divide in my stories with equally scrupulous balance, they are still stories. Readers should feel totally free to vent on individual characters for their actions, beliefs, or even their halitosis, but beating each other up over real life political differences while theoretically discussing a fictional universe is neither warranted, nor courteous, nor constructive.

***Snip***

It should be noted as an example that until very recently in human history (less than the most recent 100 years)*, and throughout all of human prehistory, fat was a good thing. As Jonathan Cresswell and Scott Washburn wrote in Eric Flint's 1632 universe:

Ring of Fire, When the Chips are Down wrote:"If we don't get people to plant the seed potatoes by this spring, won't they just rot anyway?" said Melissa. "It took Frederick the Great years to make them do it. Better the carrot than the stick—even better carrot sticks, of course . . ." Melissa still hadn't quite made the mental adjustment from calories make people fat to calories allow people to survive. "But junk food's powerful stuff—it conquered the world in our time, and they won't have any built-up immunity to it. Now, we can't spare sugar for anything nonessential—"

Italics are the authors'.

* Even today, if we look at the entire human population of the Earth, not just the population of countries that have an abundance of food, for most of humanity, fat is still a good thing.

Three cheers for the host's wise words.

How to solve this politics difficulty?

I have just contributed to facebook the "Non-Political SF Writers Group"to which folks interested in writing SF are invited and in which politics is banned.